The Daily - Senator Claire McCaskill on Losing Missouri and the Politics of Purity

If any Democratic senator representing a red state was going to survive the midterm elections and continue serving in 2019, it was thought to be Claire McCaskill. But she lost. We spoke with her as her time in office was winding down. Guests: Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, and Sabrina Tavernise, a national correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. This episode includes disturbing language.

Duration: 30m
Broadcast on: 20 Dec 2018
Audio Format: other

This episode includes disturbing language.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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Hi. A couple of her aides took us down to her hideaway. These are the elevators that would take you up to the Senate floor. In the bowels of the Capitol. This is the part of the Capitol that makes you feel like you're in the 1800s. But they were still a couch to sit on. Hey Claire, how's it going? Hi. And there she was. Good, come on in. Hi, this is Lindsey and Sabrina. Hi guys. Hi. Welcome to my paired down hideaway. Indeed, it is paired down. Yeah, all my pictures are gone and my shelves are gone and my normal desk is gone. It's on her iPad with her shoes off. Yeah, here I am with an iPad. Thank you for taking the time, by the way. Yeah, my pleasure. So I'm going to start in the beginning and I want you Senator McCaskell to go back and remember for me what politics were like when you first started in politics in Missouri. Well, it was a blurry line back then because we didn't have the sharp divisions based on cultural issues. There were a whole lot of anti-choice Democrats in the Missouri legislature. There were a whole lot of pro-gun Democrats in the Missouri legislature. There were a whole lot of rural Democrats in the Missouri legislature. Kind of hard to imagine today, right? It is. The Missouri legislature is dominated now by Republicans by and large because of the strength of the Republican Party outside of the two major urban areas. When did you start seeing that change? Well, you started seeing it really during the Clinton years when you started having a lot more issues come up, whether it was abortion or whether it was guns or whether it was gay rights. And so as we began to address some of the inequities in our country as a party, there were a whole lot of white working class voters, particularly in rural America, they said, well, what about me? Hey, what about me? And really, that's the vein that Trump tapped into very, very effectively as a good marketer. And how did you navigate that Senator McCaskell? Well, I mean, clearly, not very well because I lost two terms. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of voters in Missouri that don't make up their mind on party. And so my goal was always to work harder than everybody else, to show up, show respect. That counts for a lot. If we hadn't had the Kavanaugh spectacle, if Trump hadn't camped out in Missouri, I think we would have had a chance this time because we had a lot of motivation on our side and they weren't that enthusiastic.

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